Qmmunity: The Butch Is Back

Happy Pride month to one and all! Over the past year or so, I moved away from the interview format this column used to have – mostly because I took on more writing responsibilities in our larger Calendar section. But since June is a special time, I felt it called for special columns! So Qmmunity this June will be interviews highlighting events featuring local and visiting queer folks alongside the absolutely PACKED Pride listings y’all crave. 

Kicking off the Pride spirit is MASS Gallery’s latest exhibition from Australian-born and L.A.-based artist Esther Godoy, opening this Saturday at 6pm and running through July 11. “Butch Is Not a Dirty Word” features portraits that complicate the butch identity as it’s changed through the years. Godoy came of age during the early Nineties and found “a deep tension between the hard-earned sense of selfhood developed through older paradigms and the freedom introduced by new ones.” Through compiling this exhibition, they say they’re able to “explore those very tensions.” 

“It serves as a bridge connecting contemporary gender discourse,” Godoy says, “with the profound wisdom gained from the masculine-of-center identities of lesbian cultures past.”

Godoy says their childhood experience as an immigrant exposed them to three different continents’ worth of queer culture and because of that, they’re “drawn to subjects who deeply disrupt the very subcultures they have turned to for belonging.” With the ultimate goal of representing butch identity as diversely as possible, they found throughout their work – often in the form of interviews and personal relationships – that the common projection of butches as emotionally unavailable and aligned with toxic masculinity doesn’t exactly play out in reality. In fact, the majority of butches Godoy spoke with conflated their identities with “care, social responsibility, and deep relational attunement.”

“There is also a tired notion of butchness restricted to a classic, white, slender, male passing, denim and leather clad characterization,” they say. “Through my work, I aim to dismantle this stereotype and celebrate our profound diversity across gender, race, ethnicity, body type, and class. We are by no means a monolith, and my project serves as a living archive to make that vibrant, expansive reality visible.” 

MASS Gallery President Beth Schindler caught an earlier incarnation of the “Butch” show and found that as “someone that loves Dÿke print media and a femme that loves a butch,” it really spoke to her. Godoy later visited Austin and the pair became fast friends. “They saw the thriving queer community here and how hard we show up for each other,” Schindler recalls. “We have been scheming ever since to get this project up in Austin.” For Godoy, there’s a great deal that appeals about showing their work at MASS, as “experiencing this project in a physical gallery space is profoundly rewarding.”

“Much of this photography has been purposefully censored and deemed unsuitable for the cultural hellscape of social media,” Godoy says. “The last few years have been awful having to water down and censor ourselves to remain connected to our audience. This work was never meant to be flattened into mere content … It is a living record of our community that is meant to be experienced viscerally in the physical world, completely outside the confines and dictates of an algorithm.”

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This article appears in June 5 • 2026.

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